By: Dave Cooper, RackNerd

If you’re one of those people that see a hosting deal, purchase it without thinking where what location/country it’s hosted in. SHAME ON YOU! 🙂

This is the single most important factor when selecting a host and it’s one that seems to be forgotten a lot.

Why is location important?

Have you ever gone to a website and it seems like it takes forever to load? Chances are it’s hosted far away from where you’re located. Visitors that experience slowness while browsing will lose confidence in your brand quickly. If a site is not snappy your visitors to your site will likely stop browsing and move onto something else.

Making sure your site is hosted in the right location is the key to a successful web site. Google ranks your site in its search results based on how fast your site loads… That’s right! Sure there are other key factors like how your site is coded etc but the location is way up their too.

Know your audience

It’s important to know your target market if you’re wanting to take on the world and give everyone high-speed access. We need to start talking about CDN (Content Delivery Network) but that’s for another time.

I will give you a scenario on why location is important.

If you have a website hosted in Germany and the audience is in Australia most of the time when a user requests your site in most cases it will route through the United States before it hits Europe, this causes latency for the end-user and it makes your site load that little bit slower. In this scenario hosting in Australia would be the ideal however due to the costs of bandwidth in Australia there are better alternatives.

Based on this scenario Los Angeles would be the most cost-effective hosting location as it’s in the middle of the link which means faster response times.

Conclusion

I cannot stress this enough, server location is important, don’t overlook it if you are a newbie. For the more advanced users, CDN’s are the way to go to make sure your site is always responsive. Cloudflare, KeyCDN, Akamai just to name a few.

RackNerd has datacenter locations all over the world and we are continuing to invest and grow our global infrastructure. To date, we have clients from every continent of the world (except for Antartica!). Click Here to view our hosting offerings.